Dell Wyse ThinOS Version 8.5 Administrator’s Guide

Supporting RDP H.264 AVC444

RDP uses the ITU-T H.264 graphics compression (codec), also known as MPEG-4 AVC (Advanced Video Coding). In RDP 10, AVC/H.264 supports the full-screen AVC 444 mode. By default, this mode is enabled on thin clients for Windows 10 and Windows 2016 remote sessions.

The original H.264 codec only transfers YUV420 frames. However, some chroma data from sampled YUV444 frames is discarded. The feature that allows the lost chroma data of a frame is transferred using the same method as applied to the sampled YUV420 data. This improves the image qualities with many artificial sharp edges, and mounts of regular color boundaries, such as texts. Therefore, the image quality can be compressed using the same H.264 technology by using the same set of software or hardware, instead of using a different codec. This results in more scalability on system work load and network bandwidth occupation.

For more information about Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP)10 AVC/H.264 improvements in Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016, see cloudblogs.microsoft.com/enterprisemobility/2016/01/11/remote-desktop-protocol-rdp-10-avch-264-improvements-in-windows-10-and-windows-server-2016-technical-preview.